


If Binns Taught This, I Might Pay Attention in History of Magic

by Reera the Red (nimmieamee)



Series: Notes from the Wizarding World [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Chocolate Frog Cards, History, Malfoy family legends, horror stories, time turners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:34:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 45
Words: 17,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/Reera%20the%20Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it says on the tin. Wizarding history both ancient and modern, large and small, at home and abroad. But generally not what's on the approved syllabus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wendelin

In order to convince Muggles to set her on fire, Wendelin the Weird would not-so-surreptitiously cart cauldrons full of toads about, fly her broomstick in broad daylight, cackle loudly about spells on the steps of Muggle churches, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, disguised herself and snuck into the home of a magistrate, where she startled him by saying, “Wooh. Wooh. I’m a  _witch_.”

To which the magistrate replied, “Ghost, you mean.”

"Sorry, what?" said Wendelin.

"Ghost," said the magistrate, "It’s ghosts you’re thinking of."

"I’m quite sure it isn’t," said Wendelin, who knew a ghost or two personally.

"It is," insisted the magistrate, "Because it’s ghosts that wooh and witches that — that cackle and carry toads and weigh the same as ducks, and so on."

"Weigh the same as ducks?" Wendelin asked incredulously.

"Yes, yes," said the magistrate, "Wait. I know you. Didn’t I already have you burned?"

And in fact he had. She had already convinced him of her witchiness once. What a faux pas to forget it now! Wendelin had to act quickly to wipe his memory of the previous burning, which was a shame. She herself had such lovely memories of how the flames had tickled, and rather regretted obliviating him, the dear.

He was a very nice Muggle. A bit silly. But properly witch-hating and all that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to Monty Python just because.


	2. What became of Gryffindor's line?

Hufflepuff’s daughters thrived and Slytherin’s sons merely survived. But what became of Gryffindor’s line? There are many that say Slytherin cursed him to produce only Squibs, or that he had no children, or that he had too many, or that he died out with the McKinnons, or that Harry Potter is actually his great-great-great grand-nephew, twice removed.

Which is all a load of nonsense. He had one child. Exactly one. And she fell in love with a Muggle, and, as reckless young women will do, she angered the wrong kinds of wizards. So they cursed her Muggle with something so unspeakable and foul that to live would cause him agony. And, remorseful, she did the only thing she could do.

Then she gave up her father’s sword. And she never looked at another man again. Ravenclaw’s daughter will haunt us until the wizarding world itself should stutter to a halt. But Gryffindor’s daughter willed herself forgotten. Ravenclaw’s daughter died for love, and that is the sort of thing we don’t mind remembering.

Gryffindor’s daughter killed for it.


	3. Smokescreens

"Those years were terrifying for wizards and Muggles alike; and they say that the great failure of humanity, this complacency in the face of rising evil, this epoch in which Muggle leader after Muggle leader invited Darkness itself to tea and elevated it to social theory and reveled in it as though it might promise a great future — they say all this was in fact the work of Grindelwald and his men.

"But I say to you that in Smolensk and Cherkassy and Warsaw there was many a Muggle who, whether fighting or running for his life, saw in an instant the smoke clear and the rubble part to reveal — us. Squabbling, cowardly, using the barbarism of the age to mask that Darkness within ourselves, the Muggle conflict a smokescreen for our own desperate power grabs.

"We never orchestrated the Muggle war. To believe so is to believe in the strictest blood purity and Grindelwaldian propaganda, which would elevate the magic-user to a god. We are not gods. We simply used their war and their barbarism to excuse our own."

\- The transcript of a speech by Albus Dumbledore before the Wizengamot, July 1956,  _Correcting Certain Misconceptions Which Hold Sway in the Magical Community_


	4. Lions

Our most cheerful alums flock to the Hufflepuff club, to its cozy dens and immaculate dining rooms; and the Slytherin club remains to this day in its old Knockturn spot, imposing and exclusive, where the snootiest house elves in Britain are ready to chuck one out at the slightest hint of blood treason, or even for wearing last season’s robes. 

Ravenclaw’s club lasted a mere decade beyond its founding, before it split into two clubs, one for Ravenclaws who preferred the scientific method to magical puttering, and one for Ravenclaws who believed in sensible and established arcane philosophies instead of modern and silly Muggle experimentation. From there it has split a further forty-three times, and today Ravenclaws may have their pick, or else they may simply found their own branch; and, individualistic as they are, they often do.

But what happened to the Gryffindor club?

Once the heart of Godric’s Hollow, its warm red wood welcoming any stalwart young heart, it now lies ruined, ivy winding through the high casement windows, the foundation a bone-strewn home for stoats and mice and snakes. It is gone. No one mentions it. The hulk of it has been swallowed by the old cemetery, and Gryffindors today pass it by, unheeding, unaware that once they, too, had a place beyond the walls of Hogwarts to call their own. 

The Gryffindors did not wine and dine in their club, you see. They did not network and exclude, passing judgment on blood or elves or robes. They did not dissect and bisect knowledge in infinite mathematical loops, separating magic from science, experimentation from philosophy. 

No, the Gryffindors took sides during the Anarchy. They became Levellers. They fought tooth and nail against each other during the Barons’ Wars. In the Gryffindor club, it was not good cheer or blood or science which ruled, but sides, banners, civil conflicts — supporters of Lancaster dueling the supporters of York. 

Gryffindors do not shy away from conflict. And today conflict unites them, a heady drug, calling even the fiercest lions together under one cause.

But in earlier times? War or peace, lions were lions. And these lions dearly loved their banners and ideals. So, brought together, they could only destroy each other for supremacy.

Their club is gone. Now they only fight the other houses. It is better this way.


	5. Bonnie & Clyde

Bodil Blair did not lose her head when her lover, half-goblin Shanley Snipscar, was taken to Azkaban for trading time turners to low-level Gringotts employees determined to reverse the outcome of the last goblin war. But she did use some of his merchandise to rewrite history and set him free, and when this was accomplished Snipscar was a grimmer man entirely and the two had a new purpose: to punish a Ministry that would subject magical persons to Dementors.

Given strength by their love for each other, Snipscar and Blair gathered a band of remorseless outlaws: terrible Tomkin, ill-fated Fortunata Fortescue, tricky Charon Carrow, and old Donn Derwent. And the group went on a stupendous spree, a saga worthy of song, bending time to suit their whims and enacting vengeance on the MLE, killing more than fifteen Aurors total.

Fortunately, Blair and Snipscar are not remembered as they should be, as the wizarding world’s premier gangster and his moll. By time-turners they rose to prominence, and by time-turners they were defeated. Aurors Tonks and Shacklebolt, cleverer than their fellows and not unsympathetic to the anti-Azkaban stance, went back in time and prevented their first meeting by offering Blair a prominent Ministry post in Iceland fresh out of Hogwarts, and pushing Snipscar into the arms of a thoroughly uncriminal Hufflepuff.

They still feel a bit bad about it. The course of love and all that. But it’s not like anyone can prove it happened, as all the evidence has been rewritten by the current timeline.

 


	6. Crossroads

The Leaky Cauldron was always meant to be more than just a geographic crossroads. For much of its history, its traditional proprietors, the Dodderidges, kept a hidden back room, often in defiance of anti-Muggle laws and even the Statute of Secrecy.

Here, strange new Muggle devices were introduced and refined upon: cameras and ceramic toilets, cocaine and curious antiseptic sprays. Witches who preferred Squibs or half-giants collected in the back room, secure in the Cauldron’s secrecy policy; and wizards whose non-magical lovers were persecuted in Victorian London found this a safe place to engage in a dalliance. Magical painting techniques were invented behind silken screens in the corridor, thanks to a young muse of legendary beauty and dubious name who was perhaps a little bit Veela and who later found fame starring in early Muggle films. Young Hogwarts rebels darted in and out: here was Horace with a half-breed of tremendous power, with whom he could not speak freely at school, and a little bit before him were Albus and Elphias holding court in the corner sedan.

But such places never last long. The Dodderidges doddered out of being some time ago, when waves of political fervor swept our world and dispensed first with the intellectuals and then with the curious and then with the oddball thinkers.

And Tom, fearing for his safety, will not let anyone into the back room now.


	7. Beauxbatons

To the Muggles, the area surrounding the palace of Beauxbatons housed only a sprawling monastery and convent. It was nothing of note, a place largely disregarded, though now and then a nobleman wishing to send his Muggle daughter there would be gently rebuffed and pointed elsewhere; this branch of this particular order, it seemed, was very, very exclusive.

And yet, over the years, posing as holy men and women, the students of Beauxbatons made connections all over Muggle France, writing to poets and great thinkers, escaping from the school on weekends to meet in some grand salon near Paris, and disseminating amongst themselves, little by little, principles which belonged not to an old religious order cloistered on a mountainside, but to all who dreamed of a new kind of world. They lived not lives of magical seclusion, but instead embraced the changing country around them, the new ideas, the great philosophies. Many found themselves more or less long-lasting positions in the Muggle world. Many took up arms in conflicts that they could have easily ignored. And, once, long ago, one graduate even became the mistress of a famous royal personage.

She would later invite classmates and younger alums to Versailles. These included, of course, the members of Beauxbatons’s wildest, most uninhibited class: the class of 1683. They delighted in making faces at the Sun King when he wasn’t looking.


	8. Blood Sport

Blood sport was not uncommon, once, in out-of-the-way and peculiar places, uncivilized and dirty places for strange old one-eyed men, places where sinister people placed bets, places where the loveliest girls had full red mouths to hide their fangs,  _Dark_  places.

Envision those coliseums of old: the red-stained floors, the werewolves paid to tear opponents to shreds, the masses of poor exploited half-breeds dueling, the uneducated Muggle-borns who wasted hard-earned coin, the enforcers torturing the unluckiest of gamblers; and each horribly bloodthirsty supporter cheering on the roaring half-giant, the shrieking Veela, the vampire with his throat carved open and the sinews exposed. Horrible.

There was in the East, in the worst of these places, a very low person: the first Krum. A Muggle-born not accepted to Durmstrang, he was not only kin but also a kind of spiritual ancestor to this Krum we have now, so talented was he in the arena. Though purebloods would not let him into their schools, they would let him into their death-rings, for the purebloods, in those days, loved best their death-rings.

He fought with rings and spikes and dragon heartstring wound around his knuckles. He fought wildly (broadsheets across the continent read:  _The Fiercest Mudblood! A Beast to Behold_!), and he became a champion. He became a household name. He took a wife whom he adored and who was too well-born for him. He took his hard-earned coin and spent it not on bets but on schools and hospitals and his fellow fighters’ futures. He was no saint — he drank heavily, and kept company with others as low as he, but in time he purchased the arena. And suddenly the sport became faster and more spectacular, but also kinder to its participants. No more torn throats, no more wolves with bloody maws. And now a Muggle-born who could not pay off debts to the arena had no fear of being cornered and cursed until his skin blistered and his eyes boiled in their sockets.

And others followed the first Krum’s lead. Others spent blood in the death-rings, but made from this new lives and fortunes.

But the fine old names who no longer owned the arenas soon became terribly enlightened. In a stunning editorial, a certain pure young Master Poliakoff pointed out all this awful blood. The eleventh Mrs. Malfoy pointed out the sport’s long association with Dark Magic. Baron Dolohov pointed out the exploitation, the low characters, the masses of uneducated and muddy simpletons gaping at so many lawless duels. And the first Krum, Lady Grindelwald pointed out, was a drunkard who was terribly free with his well-born wife.

Laws were passed to close the arenas. The era of bloodsport was over. What we now understand as a kinder, better era commenced, with no more of these terrible places for the werewolf or half-giant or down-on-her-luck Muggle-born to earn her keep. So they do not earn their keep this way. In many cases, they do not earn their keep at all. Because now one needs a license to duel, and there are genteel rules to the sport now, rules devised by Notts and Lestranges and other such highbrow persons, persons who wouldn’t dream of supporting torture and bloodshed.


	9. Uses for Time Turners

The Ministry warns against meddling with time because the common consensus is that through time one can unmake the world, erase one’s forefathers from existence, or trap all living beings in a complex loop of start and go and back to start again.

But time is a great deal stronger than that. One may go back a few hours, weeks, years, or even centuries; and there will almost always be a powerful force that checks the meddling, that keeps the world from descending into chaos. So you want to visit your ancestors? Very good. It will likely turn out to be necessary: great-great grandmama and darling great-great grandpapa will never meet, unless you should take it into your head to make the introductions. 

No, meddling with time is banned because there is one terrible thing it accomplishes, one kind of glitch that recurs, over and over again, when human will triumphs over time. When wizards and witches first began to experiment with time, it was not simply to greet their forebears. It was often because of a niggling thought, persistent and overwhelming: _I wish I had never been born._

Time, for some reason, will make accommodations for that sometimes. When the person is alone. When the person is young, full of wild thoughts, undisciplined. When the person has not yet made their own special mark on the universe. And so it is not to save the world that time magic is highly regulated. It is because of the lost potential. It is because of the suicides.


	10. Brave (like Neville)

We remember him as courageous, which means he must not have felt fear, which is tremendous for his time. When famine crept through magical and Muggle households alike, and there were few spells to make anything grow. Magical plants had teeth and magical beasts feasted on men. Powerful wizards took the forms of monsters, and beautiful witches hung the corpses of foolhardy knights from the boughs of their green trees. Plagues and strange maladies and inexplicable fevers could fell the healthiest children, and no quick dueling arm or strong swordsman’s grip could keep them bay. No matter how desperately he might have wished it so. So to not feel fear in such an era? Impossible. 

Truly. That would have been impossible. Godric, fighting his way through venomous forests, watching wizards and witches commit all manner of monstrosities, alighting on once-prosperous towns only to find the residents starved, or succumbed to sickness — he lived with fear every moment of his life. He was forever terrified.

Only he told himself, over and over again, that the fear did not matter. That one had to live in spite of it.

That is courage, of a sort.


	11. City of Vision

Glorious Chernobog, the city of vision! The ordered city, with cobbles made of dragons’ teeth, and every perfect parapet carved of stone rescued from goblins’ vaults. Chernobog with its curving towers to reach the stars, and its courtyards bounded by straight and systematized rows of windows — eye-shaped, square, and long; yet arranged with delightful symmetry, for Chernobog is the planned city, the pearl, the correct city, where magic is made methodic. Branching out from the central square they made space for wide boulevards paved with elves’ bones, trim townhouses hung with wolf fur, elaborate libraries for the elite, and a great city hall painted such a bright silver that it might have been washed with the blood of Veela.

But there was to be no such blood in perfect Chernobog, planned Chernobog, built by werewolves and elves and hags, sacrifices to Chernobog, the creatures Chernobog was then warded against. No room for beasts in Chernobog — clean Chernobog! Conceived by that great, defeated thinker.

Beautiful, abandoned Chernobog, which could have been great: a model city. Uncluttered by the unwanted. Pure Chernobog, disciplined and law-abiding, with everyone in their place.

Perfect Chernobog, lying empty, though once it was the city of Grindelwald’s dreams.


	12. Highly Collectible Chocolate Frog Cards (1)

Ah, I see you have Scylla Selwyn’s card. How lucky you are! Here is a true magical heroine, a gentle wife and devoted mother, the sort we do not have enough of today. The reverse of the card will tell you that Scylla was one of the greatest charms experts the world has ever seen and that she devised the basis for our modern shrinking spell. But her heroism goes beyond that. She is also known for her loyalty. She is said to have waited faithfully for more than a hundred years for her husband, Seton.

Now, there were whispers that, before his ship disappeared, Seton had been seen seducing a Muggle somewhere near Nova Scotia. But no one could bear to tell Scylla this. You see, she was so loyal that she carried with her a perfect reproduction of his ship until the end of her days. 

A reproduction so lifelike that the occasional fanciful witch or wizard could swear they heard, during quieter intervals, the sound of Seton pleading with the ocean to set him free.


	13. Wisdom

When our house founder was very young, she fell in love with a distant cousin, a bastard Squib who had no special birthright, no learning, no refinement or badges of honor. He could only do very paltry things — tan the hides of beasts that bolder men had slain, carve toys for children from scattered bits of wood, thatch roofs for his neighbors, carry water for local widows, string together nuts and bits of horn for his bride.

And persons like this have no seat at our magical tables, we say. They are dull and uninspired and useless. They make neat straw people we can use to enact moral fables; they make sad tragedies, these kind and small people; they make good sacrifices. And so, naturally, Helga’s beloved was destined to—

What? What’s that? Did you think I was going to say die? Don’t be stupid. Just because we might think a good heart has no place here, just because we might suppose a person who has uncommon talents has no talents at  _all_  — that doesn’t mean he died. He did not die. They married. He lived. They were happy. 

But you will not find these details in  _Hogwarts: A History._  He does not make a good story. So we have erased him from the books, relegated him to that line of duffers ignored by time. Like many of Helga’s chosen, he is omitted by our cleverest chroniclers, waved out of history by the courageous and the cunning alike. And so you, who know only our records and our fables, you have begun to wish you had someone sparkling and sharp and witty, someone large and bold and heroic, someone dark and mysterious and thrillingly selfish — some  _story._  You could love nothing less than that.

You are very clever. But to me, as long as you think like that, you will never be as wise as Helga was.


	14. The Cup

Tricktrap and Dirkclaw, Gringotts Bank’s half-goblin Ministry liaisons, considered over luncheon the issue of the Cup.

Truthfully, Mrs. Lestrange could not be trusted. She embodied the worst of these witches and wizards: every bit of sneering superiority, every ounce of malice. And the Cup clearly belonged to the Smiths. Gringotts records indicated as much, and a quick review of  _Prophet_  back editions from around the time of Hepzibah’s murder suggested foul play. It also had about it such an aura of evil — to touch it, Snoutfling had determined, would be to open oneself up to a kind of Darkness that even a goblin could not keep at bay.

The careful wording of the latest treaty did seem to suggest that items like this ought to be reported to the humans.

But, midway through the first course, up-and-coming Mr. Fudge came in. He had a kind of retinue — pink-cheeked and pink-garbed Miss Umbridge, oily young Avery, the very hysterical and half-breed-hating Mrs. Fudge, Mafalda Hopkirk (who felt goblin magic was by nature improper), and race-conscious little Albert Runcorn. First they snubbed Tricktrap and Dirkclaw, and by and by they had the idea that they could not eat with such persons present, and soon enough up-and-coming Mr. Fudge was asking the two to please depart, because up-and-coming Mr. Fudge was the sort of person who never wanted any trouble.

"We’d better not tell them then," sniffed Tricktrap.

Dirkclaw mentioned that perhaps this would be a mistake. Simple omissions; minor snubs; small, cowardly bits of sneaking and sneering designed to wage the goblin wars in miniature — surely all this made the business of liaising more difficult. Surely it opened one up to a kind of Darkness, really.

But Fudge’s Mrs. made such a stink because those goblins were still there, and soon enough Dirkclaw decided that whatever the Cup intended for the world — she and hers had it coming.


	15. Unity

Every so often, very rarely, once every three hundred years or so, it will begin with a few uncommon Gryffindors, those hatstall Gryffindors, some of which are also as solid as Hufflepuffs and some of which are as sharp and ambitious as Slytherins, and at least one of which has the open, questioning mind of a Ravenclaw. And soon enough one or two questioners will join them, by the side of the lake, carting with them books and clever theories, unusual radish earrings; with arcane experimental spellwork threaded through their house robes, turning them unusual and new colors, sure to result in docked points for Ravenclaw when some prefect catches them out of uniform. By and by, there will come also one or two of those duffer types that defies categorization - not someone out to make connections, or to impress with their brilliance, or to showboat excessively, determined to be a hero; only a kind sort of person who wants new friends, one of Helga’s old favorites.

And, if they are  _very_  lucky, a showboating, brilliant, connection-making dungeon-dweller will also appear — will hide in the back until he’s ready to come out with some sharp observation, or will plant herself in the center to knit them all together with a purpose.

And if you wonder how it is that sometimes our world  _does_  grow, that sometimes it takes Muggle inventions and refines upon them and transmits them to all corners to improve our lot, that sometimes it passes new and better laws that seem to fulfill the purposes for which they are intended, that sometimes it does more than claw at the small-minded darkness which is forever dragging us backwards, more than battle the terrible entropy that categorizes all magical life…

Well. This is how. Every so often, very rarely, a group comes together to defeat the Hat.


	16. Highly Collectible Chocolate Frog Cards (2)

Several hundred years after his death, Apollo Leron will give rise to a very collectible chocolate frog card. His melodies will be rediscovered, and he will be named the greatest magical musicmaker since Blodwyn Bludd.

But right now he has just been kicked out of the Weird Sisters. The fact is, he has a perplexing insistence on composing only harmonies for brass instruments and toadsong. He cannot play the guitar or the lute or even that most basic magical instrument, the Abiyoyo ukelele. And his Boggart — a flood of witches’ underthings about to drown him, the result of one  _very_  intense concert — is, as lead singer Myron Wagtail puts it, “Just not rock and roll.”


	17. Sweet Dreams

“ **The Magic of Dreams**  
 **(not to be confused with Oneiromancy)**

First studied by the prophetess Anoushka Ramiel in 1607 at the court of Jahangir, dream magic is powerful in the extreme, perhaps the most powerful any witch or wizard can produce, but also highly unpredictable and erratic. It resembles the magic of the hypnotized and the Imperiused, for it is possible for the caster to both wish it done and despair at its doing. It runs contrary to the circuitry of the magical mind, ebbing up from the great subconscious of every witch or wizard, and those who have attempted to channel it — as did the Spanish wizard Narciso Mimoza in the nineteenth century — have found themselves sinking rapidly into madness.

To the students who wish to learn it, we ask you to recall that moment just before falling asleep, when the voices of your housemates fall off, or are heard only at a distance, and the ominous rustling of the curtains around the bed suddenly ceases to disturb you. There might be an odd twitching of your limbs at this time, a spasmic thing which you cannot control and yet which leaves your senses completely unmoved. Your hand might grasp for your wand one last time, for some comfort, and yet when it encounters a soft pillow or the empty air you are not bothered — you are already too far gone. Not yet asleep. But too far gone.

The magic you might be able to control from within in your dreams, where all morals and reasons and sensibilities and loved ones cannot reach you, is like this. You would attempt to command or understand it, to use journals and breathing mechanisms and all manner of clever tricks to bring it within your grasp, and yet before you know it you would be drowning. Senseless. Mad.

This is dream magic. The Darkest magic. No firsthand accounts of it survive. It is forbidden.”

\- The sole authority on dream magic in the Restricted Section. No Title, Author Unknown.


	18. Museum

They say there is a hall in the Department of Mysteries where the incurable remain: the motionless corpses of basilisk victims, frozen in death, a testament to the snakes’ unstoppable venom; rooms and rooms of statues, princes who once dared to cross Celtic sorceresses; and beautiful women buried up to their knees, waists, and heads, their faces twisted in horror, preserving the moment they fell prey to some ancient curse. There are hacked and ill-reassembled men who had their swords enchanted against their own limbs. In wide pens are hens that once were fine ladies, and eternally slumbering dogs dreaming the dreams of country squires who foolishly trespassed on a witch’s land.

The children speak of this hall. Adults laugh, and say it does not exist. But if you could sneak in and wander from exhibit to exhibit, upending drawers and pressing your nose to the cases of this strange gallery, you might very well find odd mummies bent in pain; and the remains of people who seem similar to us, but perhaps not quite human, ice figures with swords drawn, sleeping away the centuries in mysterious iron boxes.

The business of the Department of Mysteries is, after all, mysteries. And so it is not simply a secret government collective. It has become, in its own way, something like a hidden museum. 

Only the very lucky — and the very unlucky — are granted admission.


	19. Titanic

One of Cassandra’s great-granddaughters was so talented that she knew, almost instinctively, that Trelawney women would for generations to come sow calamity wherever they went, simply though Sight and Speech.

It would not do. It was a cursed life. There was no point. So she booked a third-class passage (why waste money, when her end was undoubtedly so near?) on the great disaster of the age. And as her fellow passengers marveled at the size of it, the grandeur, as they brought back tales of the gilded upper decks, all those ballrooms and dining rooms and gorgeous first class folk in their jewels; she sat and thought of being swallowed up by the icy black water, of vanishing, a statistic, an accursed Trelawney name snuffed out by a terrible accident no one could see coming.

She might have been consumed by selfishness, that inward-looking sin suicides are often accused of. Oh, we say, if they could look outwards and think of others, then they wouldn’t chase after death!

But do you know? She soon met a kind Muggle Finn sharing a cabin with five other Finns, a sweet Polish woman with a ten-month old baby, and a laughing family from Assyria, who had come on at Cherbourg. She broke bread with a smiling girl whose father spoke sadly of Austria to a friend, fixed toys for a small boy and his smaller brother, and tickled the feet of little Millvina, who she could see (through a haze, as though it were not quite fixed yet) might have a future that would span two millenniums.

But it was no use, none of this made her want to live. She was, in a sense, as anchored to fate as the boat she sat upon. So Ms. Trelawney was forgotten, and went down with the ship. Only her cryptic advice — concerning Lifeboat 15, or Collapsible 2 — remained, guiding those fellow passengers to safety, though the unsinkable was doomed to sink.

Yes, she was a suicide. But she was not entirely selfish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You don't even want to know about the mental state of those witches and wizards that boarded the Lusitania.


	20. If I Can Make It There

"My DEAREST Newt,

In response to your query. The city is two things: on the surface, concrete and steel and glass and money. And below that: sewage and rattling trains and soft flesh and murder. And it has always had two levels (and within those levels, eleven thousand more), and it will never have less, and as the great mundane dream of New York grows, in banks and struggles to pay the rent, and new ice cream parlors on the ground floors of department stores; so too will grow the magical and sordid nightmare of it, the townhouses where mistresses poison the men who will not marry them, the tunnels beneath Chinatown that house the Tongs, and the back rooms where bankers plot to steal money that does not exist yet.

I tell you this so that you know that to attempt to separate magical and Muggle New York is useless. There is no Diagon Alley, cordoned off and separate. There is no Leaky Cauldron to serve as a crossroads. Every alley and every bar is a crossroads; for there, it would not violate the Statute to shout that you can do magic to a crowd of amused children in the park, to advertise that you sell elixirs and potions, to declare yourself a wizard on the IRT subway. The City might not even take notice, and if it did, you would simply be another dark part of it — you would simply be the mad underground. 

It is the ideal place to begin your journey, my dear Newt. You can ask after the mutated beasts in Brooklyn’s canal in perfect safety — someone will believe you. You can see the zoo in the Bronx, with its hidden Hippogriff cages. You can examine the wild snakes and crocodiles of the American South, domesticated to serve as children’s pets in the magical parlors of Harlem; and though you will meet as many musicians as magicians there, as many poets as prophets, you with your oddities, with the bits of yourself that do not fit in, with your terrific fascination for reptile and were-rabbit… You will attract no special notice. The many levels of New York proliferate, and where yesterday a researcher who would pry open the mouth of an invisible alligator was odd, today it is simply another sight, another addition — something to ignore as the belles of Lenox Avenue hurry along their way.

But!

But. There are those who live on the surface and in the underground at the same time. Men like you, who came from a divided world, where they might have faced Dark Lords or mad purebloods or else pogroms. Men in Muggle suits, a gleam in their eye, who can make numbers and money vanish, and false opportunities appear. On parchment, these men seem to have no means: they are simple businessmen, they are cogs in the city. They are magical Muggles, or perhaps very mundane wizards. They perform great bits of charmwork such as vanishing the evidence, disposing of the witnesses. They have mastered every level; they own Aurors and Muggle policemen alike; and they take all kinds, magical and mundane, as long as one is not fastidious, not afraid of a little soft flesh or murder.

And their names are not old pureblood names, like the ones that hold sway for you, Newt. They are funny names, the names of very young men. They might make a stupid person think of house elves: Lansky. Bugsy. Lucky.

Are they wizards? Who knows? In this city, it does not matter. It does not matter if you are a witty Harlem half-blood, a dark-eyed witch aiding the Tongs, a werewolf selling Cuban coffee, a goblin from the hinterlands of Queens, or else jolly and fair and vampiric and descended from Dutch traders. We cannot determine who is worthy of magic and who is not, who is a Gryffindor to be cheered or a Slytherin to be feared. There are no signposts. No well-established names — save that joke, the elusive invisible Knickerbocker clan of New York legend — no defenders of the old magic, no worry over whether one has magic at all. No Notts or Malfoys, no persons who own great vaults and house elves.

Here the viperous, the threatening — they do not need names or property or magic. They do not need to own house elves. Magical and Muggle alike jump to do their bidding. They own  _people_. 

The old world has such rigid lines, and seeks to preserve them. Here it is different. There is fluidity, and the wise seek to preserve that. But it is not perfect, my dear Newt. There is danger here, too.”


	21. Appius

I must tell you where Appius came from, so that you will understand.

There was a city which lay beneath all the other cities of the world: our first attempt at separation from the Muggles. They say that all was harmony and light and that Salazar’s creed had not yet taken sway when this city was founded, but this is silliness. Salazar’s belief, that need to be superior, that fierce hatred of what is different, is engrained in witches and wizards as surely as love and sacrifice are. And we have always had to battle against it, to seek instead goodness and light.

But I digress. Of the city. Its name is a curse which can never be spoken. So we will call it Sybaris Below, the underground citadel, the network of tunnels and cold dripping caves where strange magical sects did battle, locking their enemies in with walls of diamond and causing the earth itself to shudder and collapse and erupt in places. The seat of death. There, the squares were lit by odd veins of hot lava and glowing gases, and the hard dirt walls gave way to olivine palaces and bizarre underground libraries. The people carried not wands, but majestic rings of ruby and sapphire which were worth nothing to them; and the children crept from shaft to shaft searching for the succulent flesh of beetles and worms, the finest delicacies their world had to offer. 

And there was murder. It was very easy, in the underground city. Once one descended below, crossed a sacred door to the center of the world, there were no rules, no Muggles — only blissful magical chaos and power.

There came to Sybaris Below a witch, very powerful, and doubly daring, for she was heavy with child. She came to rescue Sybaris’s children, to give them a seat in her warm and pleasant school. One child, his pale face shining with admiration for her beauty and courage and cleverness, put his hand in hers and swore he would follow her to the world above — this was Appius. And he fell in love in that instant, or so he told himself, but it was less with a woman’s face and form and more with the promise of a shining world above ground where all might be his, and the finest name, the loveliest face, might be affixed to his arm.

Such a thing would have seemed very great, even to the chaotic rabble of Sybaris Below.

You know the rest. Appius crawled from the earth, won himself a great name and a great title, sat at Salazar’s right hand, helped spread the creed far and wide — and became a monster, bloody, and doomed to walk the earth above ground.

He had stretched out a small hand and attempted to claim Helena when she lay in her mother’s belly, once. But she was a living child of light and air; and he a creature of the dead, cold, and dripping underground. And he never sought harmony and light, as some of his fellows did; he ever carried with him the seeds of his terrible birthplace.

So much for Appius, the Bloody Baron.


	22. Fortunate

Note that his early days were filled with pleasures so exquisite that the natural consequence must have been to desensitize him to the world.

His father, that esteemed Count, so famed for his military service, would have been deemed a Gryffindor in this country, though in truth he had about him the airs of the aesthete Slytherin. He hung portrait after portrait in the parlor, and each miniature was stunning and learned, erudite in the extreme: Waltraut of Wurzburg, the greatest potioneer that ever lived; and the wizard-knight Florian, who preserved in his painted cranium all the poetry and romance of his era; and even that old Russian hag in her fowl-foot house, with her terrible and awe-inspiring secrets trapped inside the frame. Domesticated. Made normal.

How common, how boring, how everyday these things must have become! Many young wizards and witches, lingering jobless and rough in the alleys of Vienna, staring up at the windows of the family apartments with that terrible hunger so many are soaked in from birth, would have cut off their wand hand to consult with such creatures; to wake to the sound of wealthy, louche Father reciting medieval poems to his lovers; to find Mother concocting immensely powerful brews with one hand, while with the other she adjusted her diamond earrings and powdered her nose.

But  _he_  never once thought it was special. When he learned that it was, he decided that it was only his birthright. Perhaps some reward he had earned for being particularly wonderful in another life. Certainly his due in this one. He was, after all, handsomer and cleverer and more powerful than his fellows. This did not awe him; it was simply a fact.  

His Mother dealt in facts; underneath the jewels and the cascade of golden hair, she was a mediwitch, a rational being. Her methods are still in use at St. Mungo’s today, and her theories remain the foundation of all proper wizarding households. She examined the mind — not simply her son’s, which fascinated her for it’s etherized qualities, dispassionate and clever as it was — but also the minds of all the greatest wizards and witches of the era. Arraying Malfoys and Mulcibers and Notts on her couch, she would measure the distance between an earlobe and a forefinger to determine the cause of an ineptitude with charms. She would draw out memories in her Pensieve and help her victims examine them, would point out where they had sought to forget a traumatic Quidditch accident: this was doubtlessly the reason they had birthed a Squib later on in life. She would ask after their sexual practices or lack thereof, would mark the moment in the session when they would inevitably fall in love with her. This formed the basis of a great tract that suggested ancestry and frigidity were closely linked, that the damnable fertility of the Muggles was a natural consequence of weak brains and a subconscious envy of magical folk, two qualities which she believed lingered in all their descendants and could never be purged.

Her son inherited all these clever theories alongside vaults of galleons, amazing apartments and townhouses, those helpful portraits, a veritable parade of lovers and slavish admirers, and the golden family good looks. He was, to put it mildly, steeped in fortune from his very first breath. He knew no real suffering for many years, only boredom and occasionally some small annoyances; and his followers, hungry types, all, would marvel at how clinical he was when it came to causing pain, assuming it was the result of some deliberate inner wickedness.

It was not  _deliberate_  wickedness. It was a relaxed and sedate and selfish numbness to human pain. It had been born of extreme privilege and constant good luck. This can be worse than hungry and deliberate evil. Can’t it?

It is also unsurprising, given what else we know of Gellert Grindelwald.


	23. Highly Collectible Chocolate Frog Cards (3)

Among the rarer chocolate frog cards is Eleanor Ceridwen Podmore’s. One of history’s most protective mothers, she came home one day to find her husband, Harland, attempting to hide their triplets. It transpired that Harland, in an ill-advised attempt to liven up his babysitting duties and indulge his twin passions for transfiguration and Muggle iconography, had given the children wings. Wings he didn’t quite know how to remove.

Eleanor turned him into a sand lizard in a fit of maternal pique. She was fined forty-three galleons, but refused to restore him to his proper state. She kept him in a pen in the garden until the end of their days.

The children never lost the wings, but they did grow to be faster flyers than the average Quidditch player. Modern historians have concluded that the episode left the Podmores better off than they began, even counting Harland, given that in all his eighty-six years as a sand lizard he never once complained.


	24. Forgotten

You will never learn of Tiassale, the island kingdom; the place that was founded when the first spark of magic jumped beyond strange centaur and common elf and silly fairy and wicked jarvey, and lodged itself in men. It was a network of palaces rising out of the sea, a home for man and merman alike, not large, but perfect and ordinary. The onyx-eyed young witches sang charms for true love, and batted their lashes at the mergirls near the docks. Wizard and Muggle worked together, intermarried, carried in the day’s catch, and shared it equally with all. 

Tiassale, you might suppose, was a paradise. But of course we will never know. 

There arose a great commotion in Europe, around the time wizards and Muggles alike first dreamed up the idea to capture an image in a frame. Monarchs were beheaded, small and grim men took to the stage, in Italy and Germany there were sowed the seeds of rebellion and national pride. But this was only for the Muggles. For the wizards, the wars were a network of terrible alliances with creatures most foul, of new forms of Dark Magic endorsed by scientific advancement and the power of the Statute of Secrecy at its height. 

This was the end of Tiassale, though Tiassale was nowhere near Europe. For the war lasted much, much longer for the wizards than for the Muggles. And, desperate to end it, the Ministry instructed its finest minds to test — scientifically, of course — all the weapons at its disposal. The band of adventurers and explorers we know and love today: Marduk Black, Gwyn Nott, Maleagant Malfoy, Aeron Slughorn, and Dysmas Weasley, those who ended the wars, searched high and low for a suitable testing ground. They alighted on Tiassale after a long and terrible journey (as terrible as the weapons they kept in the cargo hold).

And how odd, how perverse Tiassale seemed to them. Beautiful, the way the rays of the sun caught the shell-encrusted doorpanes. But base, and ugly, and foully mixed were the people. Slughorn admired the golden arms of the strong fisher-wizards. But their blood, he said, was an affront to society. Their religions and customs were bizarre. Their adoration for the Muggle, and disregard for the Statute, was something truly despicable.

On the first night, the travelers photographed themselves with a beautiful crowd of Tiassale’s children. This was one of the great new scientific advancements: the photograph.

And on the second night, Weasley, their leader, gave the order to begin testing.

So they did. They noted the results of blood-congealing curses and hexes to peel back the flesh. They marked the effects of fear on the fighting skills of the average wizard. All in all, the findings were mixed, excepting the great promise showed by the cargo. 

They had always suspected they would need to use the cargo passengers. Curse testing carried a horrible price: the memory of what one had done, the rush of power one felt, the certain and wonderful knowledge that one was a monster. And as long as they enjoyed themselves while doing it, they knew the Dementors in the cargo would gladly take the memories away.

As surely as they removed from the earth all memories and all knowledge of Tiassale.

When the band returned and set their new methods on their enemies, then on prisoners in Azkaban, brokering for the first time a union and ceasefire between Dementors and the rest of magical Britain, they were hailed as heroes. Orders of Merlin all around. Slughorn was named to the Wizengamot. Nott took a respectable teaching position. Black begat a headmaster. Malfoy began a family.

But Weasley, who had not fully enjoyed what he had done, was unable to move on. He never forgot. He remembered the shell palaces. He recalled with great clarity the golden and onyx witch-children. He retreated into drink, and lost his fortune. His face became very aged, he worried his sons, and he began to suspect that the world would punish him and all his line. 

"We must not judge people by the actions of their fathers, nor measure them in blood," he would spit out at his grandson, little Septimus. "We must disregard blood. Disregard it!"

At the age of one hundred and fifty, he attempted to deliver himself to the Dementors, and, when his family intervened, he descended into their empty Gringotts vault (far from the rays of the sun, which always seemed to remind him of that long-forgotten island) and put his wand to his forehead.

His children’s children are poor and mad traitors. They disregard the tenets of blood. Just as well: we must not judge them by the actions of one ancestor. They are very different.

Young Arthur, sifting through a trunk in the family attic, found the photograph of Tiassale — the only evidence the place ever existed.

"Look at this!" he said to his father. "Look! Beautiful."


	25. Source

The gardens of Malfoy Manor lapse into an artificial disorder so perfect and so cunning that one might think  _here is a real wooded thicket! Here is formed a true miracle of greenery!_  without ever knowing that this is all the work of a beleaguered house elf, ordered to work and work and work and work until he had produced a simulacrum lovely enough to compete with nature herself.

And the gardens of Beauxbatons are ordered, symmetrical, divine. They force a strange effect on the mind; first, awe at the scientific exactness of it. And next comfort, a powerful sense of human rightness and mastery as one looks on all those regular hedges interspersed with beautiful statuettes, with singing mermaids in each fountain, with rows and rows of orange trees so identical that one might suppose nature has been bested.

But the greatest garden in the world is in the far West of Asia where was once the kingdom of Xerxes and Darius and then Alexander. It is so perfect that one might assume it is not a garden at all, excepting that the white palace at the center is no palace, but a rare lily with four million petals branching out to form domes and columns; and a stem that is a central stair in jade green, and inner courtyards with sweet-smelling pools that are its syrupy aqua vitae. 

The rocks surrounding the garden, too, are plants. Chip away at them and it is not dirt you will find, but sap and inner greenery and a great concentration of healing water; the mountain is no mountain. It is one of those hard spiked desert plants so prized by mediwizards. And ringed around it are temples which are pistachio trees growing all together to form walls, and statues which are nothing more than massive, peculiarly cultivated berries that have sprung from the ground, itself no more than a branch of some tree which protrudes from the center of the earth. The leopards which stalk the garden are shrubs and mandrakes that have seized upon magic and given themselves new form. The vipers are walnut shells and willow leaves, which have soaked in the power of the place and attained a kind of independent life.

This is not nature controlled by witch or wizard. This is nature controlling itself, the highest form of gardening. And it is a puzzle to all who have visited. Phyllida Spore, who came when very young and stood on a cliff nearby and gazed at the place, asked, “Why imitate us? Why make a human place, and a human city?” She received no answer. 

And Pomona Sprout, who came when very old, concluded that this was because the garden was a trap, a network of meat-eating plants that sought to entice passing fools with its beauty, and devour them whole with enchantments once they’d passed under its almond-fruit gates.

And this may be so. For few who enter the garden come out again. It inverts the human trickery of Beauxbatons and Malfoy Manor; here we find humanity consumed by forest and hedge, by nature exercising her most magnificent artifice. 

But Neville (who made it back out again, thanks to hard work and courage) believed that this was simply herbology in its most perfect form, the plants themselves proving that anything arrogant man could do, they could do twice as well. And Ginny (who went with him and also survived, thanks to her ferocity and her will), understood that there was beauty in the trials the garden subjected one to, that the place was no devourer, but simply designed to reflect all the pain and loveliness in the world, a great testing ground to make one stronger.

But Luna (who had gone and gotten herself lost in it in the first place, thanks to her curiosity and her cleverness; and who was subsequently rescued by two dear friends, though, if you’d asked her, she would have been very shocked to realize that she needed a rescue at all) theorized that it was all the work of the creator-elf; that is, the universe’s most overworked and mercurial house-elf, the one we call Nature, who had made the world and was forever keeping it from sliding into man-made ruin.

And that here one might find the wellspring of all magic.


	26. Statute

The International Statute of Secrecy! International because it was laid down by the International Confederation of Wizards, an organization which has always believed that if it declares planetary union enough times, such a thing will spring into being, _accio_ -ed out of nothingness.

But, by their own admission, those who laid down the Statute are only those affected by witch hunts. That is the ostensible purpose of the law, after all (though naturally witch hunts were more a danger to Muggles than to witches and wizards, as any third-year History of Magic student can attest), and it is a curious purpose. Only a very small portion of the world was plagued by zealous, witch-hunting Muggles at that time — the very same portion of the world which was seized, just then, right around the seventeenth century, with a curious desire to become international, to command oceans and shatter borders and carve out new ones.

Around that time, wizards and witches took to saying:  _The Muggles will hunt us! And besides, a separation is better. The Muggles demand that we fix all their problems. They expect things of us. And anyone can see that this is absurd. Our Muggles do not need us anymore. Look how successful they are, with their gunpowder and boats, with their new appreciation for law and science and classifications._

They did not say, as some revisionists suggest:  _look how they turn on each other, all for countries and for trade, and think how terrible it would be if we helped them._

They did not say this because they  _did_  help them. In the name of bringing the enlightened Statute of Secrecy to the world. In the name of teaching others to stay away from their Muggles, and so letting the course of nature (gunpowder and boats) forge a world union. In the name of creating order and righteousness, jailing and punishing those perverse parts of the planet where a logical separation of magical and Muggle is not observed.

But I tell you that still there are places where the Statute is worth nothing; where wizards and witches gladly open their homes to Muggles; where people seek to preserve not their hides or their right to lead a planetary union, but ways of looking at the world which are not bound up in the Statute; where even the words to separate the magical and non-magical have no meaning. In some of  _these_  places, the non-magical know a wizard just by looking at him. And those law-bringers of the Confederation should like to declare him, by statute, bound to them, to their logical and orderly separation. But there is no word in these places for wizard or for Muggle.

There is only, and has been for some time, a word for  _rebel_.


	27. Odysseus

"Oulixeus Malfoy spent decades away from home, and it is said that he caroused with Veela on cold, snowy peaks; and that he littered Eastern shores with half-blood bastards; and that once he even kissed the mermaid Leuconoe — not one of these hideous, tentacled creatures we have up here, but the simple-minded, childlike, lovely beings of warmer climes. For people like to whisper that he did not love his wife, Fulgencia.

But these are the mutterings of jealous people with far muddier blood in their veins. For shame! 

I am here to tell you that he loved his wife best of all, as proper wizards should. For whenever he would return to her, he would bring some foreign trinket to satisfy her curiosity and prove his love — a shrunken head with magnificent golden hair, a pickled infant in a jeweled bottle, a perfectly intact skeleton.

For of course his travels were more scientific than prurient. The most you can say of Oulixeus and Fulgencia was that they were passionate regarding natural history and the sciences. The Malfoy library today contains the finest collection of preserved creatures in all of Wizarding Britain, a terrific public display that does credit to the intelligence and bold curiosity of generations of pure-bloods.

And what became of the Veela, the half-bloods, the mermaid? The same thing that always comes of such filth. No one knows. They fall into obscurity. Who can say if they ever existed at all?”

\- an excerpt from “A Defense of Some Much-Maligned Magical Names,” by Cantankerus Nott.


	28. Never Even Knew You Were Gone

Initial deaths, say the ledgers of the MLE, included certain members of the MacMillan family, a Longbottom cousin, a solitary Weasley, a Parkinson who’d married a Muggle girl. All prominent blood-traitors, reasoned the Aurors. All killed to make a point.

But the Death Eaters practiced, before that, on a very different sort. Not members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. Not people the Ministry concerned themselves with. Not people, reasoned Voldemort’s supporters, anyone would miss. Not  _people_ , in most people’s eyes.

The Death Eaters reasoned correctly. No one even noticed they were missing. 


	29. Highly Collectible Chocolate Frog Cards (4)

How odd Mnemosyne Edyth was! How very unlike her schoolfellows. For they, reciting charms most obediently and noting the patterns of stars as instructed, turning needle to matchstick with robotic duty and mixing counterclockwise in their cauldrons when applicable, failed utterly to drive their professors mad.

Whereas she was a prodigy in these matters. Forever interjecting, her weird mind would fire off at random, forcing strange, intrusive questions from her lips: charm is also to entice, and what does that say about us, that we love best those airy beings with the power to make a common Scourgify look like the work of the graces? Why wind widdershins in the preparation of so many potions; what of this wily discipline demands that we counter the clock, that we turn in on ourselves and work in reverse? And why do we name our children after stars, as though we should like them to illuminate society, but stars burn and burn and burn and are in reality far-off and aloof, friendless and alone, and ultimately consumed and blocked off by the black steam of new Muggle contraptions. And are we not more like the Muggles, lately, desiring to take the industrious needle and make of it a combustible, a powder keg, something not quite as sharp and practical, but nonetheless wholly dangerous? 

For Mnemosyne could link every plain, honest instruction to some uncanny notion, could find the incorporeal story at the heart of each solid, well-rehearsed incantation. Though she was the schoolroom nuisance, doomed to fail nearly every subject, it was not because she did not understand. Rather, she over-understood. She leapt beyond the matchstick and desired to make of the needle a magically-powered sewing machine. She saw in the swish and flick a rhythm no one else could. She could cut through even magic most Dark, not in a Ministry-approved decisive and rational fashion, but with joy and light, and simple memory.

We do not mean to elevate one who graduated with barely a handful of N.E.W.T.s above those prized and calm, industrious and un-improvable little minds that dot most classroom desks. Far from it. They well deserve the praise and love of their professors and the easy acceptance of their mates.

While weird Mnemosyne was to content herself with an Order of Merlin, first class, for the invention of the Patronus Charm.


	30. Dark Lord

Excepting some cousins, unimaginative country folk, Halbert had no family to speak of. It was at Hogwarts that he found family, or, more accurately, at Hogwarts that he bound housemates to himself with his easy generosity, his take-charge manner, and his prowess on the pitch. These are things that most Gryffindors enjoy. And so up went Hal, shooting into prominence, making new friends, sure to be Head Boy someday, the greatest fellow in his house. He was a particular favorite of the  Transfiguration teacher, a Mr. Dumbledore. Only recently awarded the title of Professor, this was the preferred faculty member of most, for he could throw on even his very mundane position as though it were a cloak of stars.

Hal would sit and talk to Dumbledore for hours — about helping Hagrid the seventh-year, that bumbling but kind little fellow with a passion for studying the migratory patterns of giants, about the various deceits a certain upstart named Grindelwald was practicing to the East, about all the goings-on in the school. And in those moments Hal was a model wizard. Dumbledore brought that out of him.

But there was a certain arrogance to Hal, you know. Not intentional, not something he cultivated, but there all the same. He was quick to speak out against other students who broke ordinary school infractions. Not so quick to follow rules himself. First in line when it came to sneaking out of the Tower after hours. The ringleader of many an agitated midnight secret society, the orchestrator of forbidden jaunts to Hogsmeade and even to Diagon Alley. Dippet impressed upon his House Head to adjust the boy’s headstrong manner, with detentions and harsh punishments and various school regulations. Dumbledore complied, against his better nature. 

No use, however. 

Hal was all spark, and not a particularly easy spark to contain, at that. He was passionate and loud, far-seeing and direct, witty and more than capable of striking back when cornered — a true Gryffindor. Charming and warm when lit with good company, but apt to strike out and become ablaze with disobedience. Stubborn. Good-hearted. Willful in the extreme. 

He longed for a cause — sparks love a cause. He longed to become a great hero, someone who could knock down all the dreadful bullies of the world, those Grindelwaldian fellows to the East who were all consumed with hate for Muggles. He was born too early for the local fight, you see. Pretty newborn Walburga Black had not yet been photographed in the  _Prophet_  under the headline,  **Shall We Let Filth Pollute Her Future?** And Mr. Nott was young yet, and unconcerned with the sacred nature of a certain twenty-eight.

So there was no cause for Hal, no purpose. He waited, empty, for some kind of grand and heroic future to fill him, and it did not come, and as it did not come his heroics appeared merely childish, and his leadership only a kind of bullying. He fell in with Phineas Black, the rebel struck from his own family tree for Muggle advocacy, and Black — as Blacks did — had all manner of clever heroic tools to teach him to while away the time: Crucios and Imperios and the like (loving Muggles did not mean hating Darkness in those days). 

And wild Hal took to it, with that natural talent he had for most things, when he applied himself; and by and by he booked passage East, a hero dying to rush to the scene of some potential heroism, because it would not come to meet him. He sought out those isolated villages where Grindelwald was recruiting, and there he engaged in counter-recruitment, torturing goblins who would not report what they had seen, re-classifying those Muggle-borns who had integrated and married purebloods as traitors to the cause, dispensing with any small and unworthy beings who would not pick a side and who clearly did not hunger after heroism.

It suited him. He was very gallant about it — his House Head told him so in an Owl, after hearing about one particular incident in which he saved a whole parcel of Muggles by burying some wizards alive; it seemed  _gallant._ He was so at home in reckless warfare. Perhaps one or two people were lured to Grindelwald’s side when they heard of his methods, but what did that matter? This was heroism. And Hal was born to be a hero.

He was addicted to it. He sought it in duel after duel, flinging Unforgivables near and far, always perfectly comfortable with it, always assured that he was doing the right thing, until he had a chance to duel the man himself, his sole worthy competitor for continental power — golden Grindelwald — in 1927. Hal came at it offensively (“Too offensively,” said a Mr. Flitwick, when the particulars of the battle were set out before him. “Too much playing the hero. Sometimes it is better to defend, to disarm, to lay yourself out for sacrifice. Did no one ever teach this boy that?”), but it was no use, and he fell.

 **The Fall of a Potential Dark Lord**! the  _Prophet_  said. (And, perhaps, hail Grindelwald his defeater, who would do great things in time, said absolutely everyone else — save a Dumbledore or two).

To his House Head, it was all another bitter disappointment, another powerful young man gone horribly wrong. Perhaps enforcing all those rules and regulations had done it, had driven him away. Or perhaps it came down to his innate character — perhaps he was too much a bully. But, truly, Dumbledore would have one or two more chances to experiment with the heroic character in the future. I do not tell you this story for Dumbledore.

I tell it for you. You say there’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin. But I tell you this: we all have inside us, waiting to be lured out by fury or righteousness or gallantry or boredom, a potential Dark Lord.

Wave your wand, and harm another, and delight in the hurt and what it means for you to have accomplished it, such a great person you are. Go on. Do it. Well, there he is. Your Dark Lord. 


	31. Fair Youth

Sextus Tarquinius Malfoy IV believed that he would be remembered for many great magical deeds, for the Malfoys generally are, and so convinced of this was he that he quite forgot to perform them; and so, unlike his brothers and forefathers, he is remembered for nothing much at all.

In fact, the most noteworthy moment of his life came at the hands of a common Muggle that his son (Lucius, the second but not the last to bear that name) had had a dalliance with. Snooping imperiously through the boy’s effects, Sextus found some downright appalling scribbles, cavalier in the extreme, arrogant beyond all measure.

"This puffed up Muggle worm presumes too much, Lucius!" he roared at the cowering child, "He insults our name, dares to suggest that you — a wizard, and a Malfoy, no less! — will live on only in his pathetic ink scratches! As though you will not live longer than he! As though the powerless words he tosses on parchment could ever hope to outlast a wizard’s wandwork!"

And he ordered the House Elf beaten in his son’s stead, burned the sickening poetry young Lucius had stuffed in his trunk, freely issued  _Obliviate_ s and Confunding charms until the whole thing could be pegged on the Earl of Southhampton, and shipped his own boy off to some relations who were sure to keep him in line.

"I thought they were lovely poems," Lucius sobbed to a sympathetic cousin Bellatrix (the fourth, but not the only young Black to be so christened), "Almost as lovely as the ones he wrote for you. He compared me to a _summer’s day_!”

"Yes, dear," said Bellatrix, "But did you bother to read the rest of it?"


	32. Hotel

Oh, to spend a night at the Hotel Nestor. What fortune! 

The Nestor has a glorious palm-lined drive; and orderly hedges ringed with bright tropical flowers; and silent, invisible elves to whisk away the luggage; and an attractive red-cheeked witch who gives one the room keys; and Mr. Nestor himself, in a red dressing gown, so still he appears made of black basalt, looking down appraisingly at each new guest to cross the lilac-carpeted foyer. 

One may not simply book a room at the Nestor. No concierge will take the floo call. It is not done. And how could they allot a room without meeting one in person? The rooms are all so different! The suite with invisible furniture made of thestral bones, hung in black silk, overlooking a great expanse of black ocean, always suited to sunset views and clandestine encounters. The suite that is a greenhouse, with its living walls of green vine and its fragrant blossoms that open each morning to greet one with smells of honeysuckle and jasmine, where the balcony opens onto a private inner courtyard. The suite with the decadent tables all laden with food, chocolate running from the taps in the bath, the mints on pillows that are themselves made of spun mint (not meant for an average man’s rest, no — but for a lothario’s romantic dalliance? Just the thing). There is even, they say, a peculiar room with cosy chairs and a crackling fire and a strange flat black box and a second door, which opens onto quite an ordinary Muggle hall in quite an ordinary Muggle hotel.

The Nestor is everywhere at once, you see. Or nowhere. It is a seaside resort, but it has fronted many seas. It first takes a hazy shape, like a mirage, and then it coalesces into being, looking at last as though its pink columns and winding arbors have always fronted the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Coral Sea. And those who spot it know to run home, to pack whatever they can find (quickly—quickly! before it disappears), and then to present themselves, so that the red-cheeked, black-eyed maiden may assess them, may say, “Yes, yes. You seem to need rest and rejuvenation. And I know just where to place you. On our Quidditch pitches, you will find yourself reinvigorated. In the great dining room, you will find that taste you have longed for. By the lovely blue swimming pool, you will find a lover.”

The Nestor is not simply a hotel. It is the place to answer one’s dreams. Demelza Robins met her wife there. Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan, worn and sad from their schoolyard war, relived their boyhood in the looping maze which is all hung with Spanish moss. And old Griselda Marchbanks, tired of life, sat one day at a balcony staring at the sun rising over the sea, and died.   

If it should appear before you, you must go. Even if you haven’t time to pack your bags. Believe me — it will be well worth it.

Of course, when it comes time to check out, you may find yourself on another continent.


	33. Style Tips

“‘This season’s look is romantic, respectful, and so simple it might be mistaken for a Muggle,’ says well-known couturier Twyla Twilfit, ‘With the glorious defeat of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named at the hands of dear little Harry Potter now fully behind us, even witches who have lost loved ones should feel free to break mourning robes, provided they eschew bold reds and brighter shades, and opt for more traditional tones.’

Already, well-known wizards and witches seem to be heeding this advice, with such luminaries as Celestina Warbeck stunning us at the Ministry Memorial Service in robes of jet and deepest green; Mrs. Malfoy’s marvelously simple veil of midnight blue, perfectly befitting a witch who has just seen her unjustly-maligned husband exonerated; and up-and-coming author and adventurer Gilderoy Lockhart’s turn at the Potter Remembrance Ceremony in a magnificent grey and aubergine cloak.

However, Twilfit warns against too much flamboyance.

'Absolutely no frippery when it comes to headgear,' she cautions, 'Just the simple peaked cap will do, and avoid dark cloaks or face-coverings, which will result in revolting recollections among anyone one meets. And accessories should be timeless — dig your signet rings and lockets out from your Gringotts vaults, but avoid silvery or serpentine treasures, which are in poor taste so soon, and produce abysmal associations.'”

\- an excerpt from Witch Weekly’s April 1982 issue,  _Springing Away From The Wizarding World’s Winter; Style Tips for the Surviving Sorceress_


	34. True Crime

Gawain Robards, the Auror, met Adfaer on a sad and grey Tuesday during the First War, and at the time she had very little — just a battered old trunk, really — and she was living then with Enoch Smith.

They had a curious existence. Neither she nor Smith liked Muggles themselves, but Muggles’  _things_ , bright fabrics, screens crackling with static, funny jumpers for the dog, these all captivated Adfaer. And since they captivated Adfaer, Smith gave them to her, for Adfaer had lived a sad and lonely existence, away from her family, grieving for a lost love, missing her second husband (taken by the Death Eaters, no doubt), raising a child on her own. But Robards could see that Smith adored her, and he couldn’t blame Smith, for Adfaer was as funny and honest as she was beautiful.

"I couldn’t stand to live side by side with Muggles myself," she told Smith, "But we’ve snatched up all their inventions and made them a little better, and, by Morgana, you can’t blame us for it. We should use anything we can to get ahead, I always say. Stuff it in the trunk, and use it when it’s necessary."

Adfaer’s disposition was calm and often sunny, honest even in her most blatant moments of calculation, and above all: hopeful. But her life! It gave Robards such pain to watch it develop. Her circumstances became sadder and sadder with every passing year. 

When Rupert Nonce’s body was discovered, Adfaer came to the Auror office to identify it, and Robards was charmed by her stiff upper lip, her gentle sadness, her beautiful way of lifting back the sheet and fearlessly naming the corpse, then taking it home herself, like a loyal wife should. And when Enoch had a bad reaction to some medicine Healer Strout at St. Mungos had given him, Adfaer was there, nursing him back to health, bravely naming the culprit, filling out the eventual death forms, and enduring the silly hatreds of Smith’s family, who resented that he had left such a massive fortune to such a very foreign girl.

"Her name isn’t even Adfaer, the little cheat," said Auror Proudfoot, who was linked to the Smiths by marriage and therefore biased. "It’s one of those virtue names so popular in the American South, or I think in the West Indies…"

"I shouldn’t be surprised," Robards said, affronted on Adfaer’s behalf. Proudfoot thought he knew Adfaer, but of course he didn’t know her at all. He didn’t know her like Robards knew her. "Being named for virtue would suit Adfaer beautifully!"

For Adfaer was virtuous, and besides this she was terribly wise. She’d learned the secrets of mediwizardry from her first husband, the black-eyed doctor and gentleman of letters that Robards knew she longed for, in her heart. And she’d learned wonderful charmswork from her second. From Smith, she took up tinkering with and improving (in a licensed fashion, of course) standard spells and mundane objects. And when she met Henry Cannis, the Animagus, she learned from him, as well. For it wasn’t Adfaer’s beauty that drew people in, but her willingness to listen to them, to let them instruct and guide her. 

Adfaer learned something, gained something, from everyone. She could sing, dance, write sonnets, swim like a mermaid, tell wild stories of Mojisola the shark and other mythical witches of the West, arrange flowers, duel, do acrostics, do gymnastics, cook, recite the names of every country South of the Equator, sketch out a map of Mogadishu, speak Gobbledegook; and even coax flowers into growing, using glorious herbological secrets she’d developed while living with Smith.

Robards wished he had something to teach her. When Berenger Borgin was killed in a broomstick accident, he went to see her even though Proudfoot had the case, and sat with her and held her, brought her little boy a lolly, and wiped away her tears. But there weren’t many tears, truth be told, for Adfaer was strong, not soppy. Courage and survival, those great Auror traits, had resided within her since birth. She did not need to learn them from Robards. She had no use for him. Robards knew this. It filled him with sadness. 

Still, he tried to protect her from the small and petty hatreds of lesser men. Proudfoot wanted to question Adfaer, that summer Joseph Quirke drowned in the River Lyne while out with his stepson. Proudfoot said it was getting ridiculous, that Robards clearly had a blind spot, that the young boy’s story was preposterous (Quirke had swum out to investigate what he believed was a shark. A shark! In the River Lyne!). 

But Robards outranked Proudfoot, and so the investigation was shut down. They were always shut down, because Robards outranked almost everyone, and Robards very much loved Adfaer.

Robards was demoted, after the second war. This meant he had less to offer her now. He despaired at the thought. But he could not lie to her — Adfaer never lied to  _him_  — and so he went to her sunny townhouse (inherited from Nonce), feeling the fool, for Adfaer never involved herself in politics and so was largely untouched by both wars. She was like a divine higher being, marked by special foresight and great wisdom, existing far above the affairs of men. 

But Adfaer, sunny Adfaer, clever Adfaer — she refused to hold his demotion against him. She  had her son bring him some calming elf-made wine, and held Robards’ hand as he had always held hers. And within the year they were married.

Within two years Robards caught the dragon pox and died. People felt sorry for Adfaer, they really did. Adfaer was not to live a happy life, said Mrs. Parkinson solemnly over tea. No, no, just a profitable one, was the rejoinder from Mrs. Malfoy.

Robards did not leave behind much of a fortune. This stumped Proudfoot, who had been building a case for some time, as it did not fit the pattern. He questioned Adfaer’s son, but the boy displayed a stunning knowledge of the relevant laws and MLE techniques, and left Proudfoot with even less of a case than before. Even giving the boy Veritaserum had no effect; he would not say his mother did it.

"Robards is dead! He’s gone!" thundered Proudfoot. 

"I don’t know about that. Have you found the body?"

"I ask the questions here. She trapped him, didn’t she?"

"Define trap."

"She fed him lies!"

"Certainly not. She was honest with him about every aspect of herself."

"How did she kill him?" screamed Proudfoot.

"I don’t know that she did. But if you knew where he was, you might be able to find him and ask him."

All the other Aurors laughed at Proudfoot, then. One of them was so charmed that she even gave Blaise a lift home. He went direct to the trunk when he got there. He lifted the lid.

"Thanks terribly," he told the head of Gawain Robards, with little emotion. "It went just as you said it would, the interrogation."

"Your charmswork, my boy!" said the head of Nonce. "You must practice your charmswork!"

"Never let a man cheat you, son," said Borgin.

"I certainly won’t," Blaise told them all kindly. He patted one of the heads, the way one would a dog. Then he locked the trunk again.

He was a boy with a hopeful disposition and a great deal of luck. The luck was in his mother’s vaults, and also in the trunk. She believed in storing up any small bit of wealth and fortune one could — gold or learning, magic or minds, it didn’t matter what. Anything that might help you, in trying times. 

She’d lived through terrible things, she told her son. Their whole family had, across multiple continents, and throughout many centuries. People were so small-minded, they were apt to form so many backwards and silly ideas about you, to demonize or idolize you, as if they really knew you.

They always thought they knew you.

But you had to keep going. Chin up. Reinvent yourself. Be hopeful. Find a new name if you had to. It could be whatever you liked. It could be funny and honest; if you were honest, then the silly sods could hardly complain, when the other shoe fell. 

Adfaer. The path to the funeral pile.


	35. Medical History

In some corners of the Wizarding World we have a just system in place, a logical little scheme of deterrence and basic economics. Acts too heinous for words (Darkest magic, unlicensed curse invention, simply escaping from prison) earn one the Kiss; everyone knows that. And the assumption is that this is why everyone is not flinging Unforgivables at each other, not running about devising ways to curdle the innards; this is how wizards and witches know to stay in their cool little prisons, their fixed places, under the watchful eye of their Ministries and Cabinets and Regulatory Agencies. For the threat of the Kiss is a blissful ethical straitjacket, pinning one to morality and to righteousness.

And for those that do not heed our warning? Those that earn themselves the Dementors’ Kiss? Fear not. Do not listen to those radical malcontents who rail against the Kiss, those provocateurs and revisionists seeking only to erode our time-honored methods of punishment. 

For you see, we are still kind to the ones we have Kissed. We do not dispose of the blank-eyed body as though it were so much rubbish, we do not ship the empty carcass back to its grieving family, and we do not allow victims to carve out retribution on the soulless skin. 

In some corners of the Wizarding World, we do nothing of the sort. We transform these pathetic degenerates into something they never were while they had a soul. We make them useful. Valuable. Decent contributors to society. For how else do you think we have tested the Boil-Cure potion, the Antidote to Uncommon Poisons, the Wolfsbane?

It is a grand system we have in place.


	36. Madman

Moody was born at the start of Cantankerus Nott’s revival of the old pureblood mania, reared up in a Hogwarts torn between Head Girls who dreamed of running off with Muggle farmers, and Head Boys who hissed lies and death as easily as they took house points. He was unhinged early on, people say. He didn’t like the Ministry, but neither did he like Grindelwald’s type. He dove headlong into recruitment programs that seemed to promise that even a Ministry stooge might do something useful. He learned to spell out secret words where only his counterparts might find them, in the rubble of bombed-out coffee houses. He did not shy away from skirmishes in fields where the non-magical bodies lay three corpses thick under his boot, rotting over trampled flowers. He took midnight missions in starving Muggle cities, in muddy canals, in blood-stained shipyards, alongside old Continentals of indeterminate age, gruff and vigilant men, anti-Dark magic in bent, but still somehow very different from these English Auror boys, still somehow sinister-seeming.

He learned to be gruff, vigilant, and sinister. He learned to slip between the cracks of that great conflict, to move unseen where there was no clear good and no clear evil, where everyone was murky and a bit mad. 

He’s completely mad now, of course. Everyone says so. They’d like to shove him away in some corner, to encourage him to take up a teaching post. This is not an era for madness. This is Mr. Fudge’s era. Orderly. Neat. All resolved. All indifferent.

But the mania will rear its head again. And if it seems like Moody is laughing at you as he puts you through your paces, if he seems too eager to take you on a midnight mission, if his horrible swiveling eye sees through your proclamations that all is well… it is because he knows. Death and danger will slip through the cracks of this era, through its easy and phlegmatic pettiness. And so more Moodys will be needed. More Moodys will crop up. 

Give him a war, and he will find you a use for someone a little bit mad.


	37. Traditional Pastime

In Britain they play Quidditch, which has a Quaffle and two Bludgers and a golden Snitch, and in the United States they play Quadpot, which they say has a kind of bomb for a ball.

Some Australian wizards and witches find this very cowardly. The local game of Hoonsmack, when played properly, includes all of the above, multiplied by four, plus a clutch of massive wild venomous spider eggs. You need at least three reserve Seekers to a side. Everyone doubles as a Beater. The Keeper is authorized to hex your broom. 

And of course the best position belongs to the Thwacker, who does not fly at all, but who is tasked with refereeing from the ground, armed with her croquet mallet-esque cudgels (curiously called ‘Muntsummoners’). These become necessary when players crash to the ground, as they often do, and need a nice pick me up.

For Hoonsmackers, this means being pummeled right back into the heavens.


	38. Salazar

When one considers snakes today, one thinks of massive jungle beasts, of brightly-patterned poisonous things with fangs, of the three-headed magical variety, which can curse and strike and recoil all at once.

But Salazar preferred the kind which lives in damp walls and grows slowly over time, the camouflaging kind, like the silent grass snakes he befriended in his youth. Hidden. Unnoticed. Not boastful or powerful or blessed with a fearful aspect. Patient, unrecognized creatures that are ambitious because they must be, because otherwise they would be stomped and trampled, they would spend their lives wriggling in the undergrowth.

He was not a good man. There was a hatred in him for differences, for competing forces, a jealous and unforgivable hatred not uncommon in unrecognized undergrowth people. But in some ways his House has become a house of the noticed, the powerful, the boastful, and — yes — even the unforgivably jealous who curse and strike and recoil all at once. It is now dominated by those who do not need ambition, and by those who know not how to use it.

So now Slytherin’s house is something he never intended it be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be fair, though, he should have at least considered this outcome when he decided to become a horrifying racist.


	39. The History That Would Be

Pramilith Patil was in the business of portraits, a business conducted in a sunny studio overlooking the great dome of Gringotts. There, he would take the measure of each lucky letter-receiver, each new mage not-yet-twelve; and while doing this he would be sure to make the children laugh, to put them at ease. He would say silly things like, “Cho, never fear, you’ll be the loveliest girl there, and you’ll be a force to reckon with besides, flinging those hexes about in no time,” or “Hogwarts next year, right? Where you’ll fall in with the muckrakers, won’t you, Seamus? You’ll be a young rebel, I can tell,” or “Now, Alicia, you won’t shy away from a schoolyard battle, will you?” or “Ernie, be loyal to the Headmaster now; he’s a curious fellow, but kind, a benign old army general,” or “I know you’re a bit concerned about going so far away from your mum and aunt, Susan, but you’ll be a fighter when you come back, Susan; so I think they’re more concerned over you,” or “Terry, Terry; why be scared of something stupid like poor grades? In time you’ll be battling Dark Wizards, Terry.”

But their parents would only laugh along and put down galleons on Patil’s counter, and then carefully hang the portraits over the mantle at home and sigh to each other about how hard it was to send them away to Hogwarts and how much they would miss their darlings, but that was alright; the darlings would always be children to them.

It didn’t occur to anyone to be upset over Patil’s warnings.

He alone could see the glimmers of painful growing-up in the children, the strange and dark future ahead. He wanted to prepare them for it. He thought they deserved as much. This generation — it would be browbeaten and tortured, taught to mistrust newspapers and parents and school officials; it would discover that safety was a lie. But it would do great things.


	40. The History That Never Was

Mad Weasley believed that someday, perhaps not in his time, nor in his children’s, but certainly in his grandchildren’s, there would come to pass a revolution, an overturning of that dread Statute; and in great new societies all peoples, Magical and Muggle, would strive up, up, ever-upwards,  _together_.

He could see it in his mind’s eye. The dreaming Muggles would pursue this new skyscraper love of theirs, would use their metals and mortar and technologi-thimmies; and their brethren, the wizards, would help. Great plazas would form high above the dusty ground of the past, held together by charms and suspension cables. Millions upon millions would mingle in the elegant, grandiose hives of the future, sharing in both old things (potions and astronomy and summoning spells, how dull and common) and in the  gloriously new, like Muggle telegraphs, and neon lights, and pneumatic tubes. 

All would know these secrets. And so the world would progress into the future, secret upon secret, up towards the heavens in greater spires and climbing stories. And Mad Weasley’s grandchildren would be blessed to live in it, would wake and cordially wave hello to dimpled and industrious Muggle neighbors, would ride to work each day in cleverly-constructed trolleys, would hold their Quidditch matches near powerful Muggle office buildings and clock towers, their more mundane cousins peeking out of the windows to cheer them on.

And nothing —  _nothing_ , not even this silly lust for the past that consumed Nott’s group — could throw the world off course, thought Mad Weasley. The maddest of the Weasleys. Septimus, the silly seventh son.

Oh, what a beautiful dream. Absurd. But beautiful.


	41. True Crime II

The students were paralyzed in the days after Myrtle’s murder, apt to conjure up frightful chimeras, imagining shadowy portents everywhere they could, consumed by fear to such a degree that investigations became impossible. An overcast sky meant Dementors near the Quidditch pitch (as if that would ever happen). A noise at the entrance to the common room was a murderer slashing the portraits. Every cup at supper was bound to be a portkey to murder.

Take Fawcett, for example. She’d spent an hour of Potions class chopping Devil’s Snare vines. She should have known perfectly well that such vines, when cut lengthwise, release a red juice, staining clothes, fingernails, and skin. And yet, catching sight of one of her classmates as they came up from the dungeons and onto the weak light of grounds, she shouted out, quite irrationally, “Blood! You’re covered in  _blood_!”

To which Riddle replied, with no little contempt, “Don’t be ridiculous. Think I’m the murderer, do you? Going to report me to the Aurors, Fawcett?”

This was probably what Fawcett had been thinking, as she was beyond all rationality, but she went red herself and would not admit to it. Instead she said, “Well—well, what if you’d should have been hurt? Or, or the next  _victim_ —”

Riddle twisted his lips into something like a smile. He said, “That’s highly unlikely, I think.”

Riddle alone did not succumb to the mania. He was perfectly calm. Headmaster Dippet personally commended him for it at that year’s Leaving Feast.


	42. The First Lesson We Learn

Many a Hogwarts first-year, late for a class in some high tower, has glanced despairingly at the stair and turned to the nearest prefect for help. There must be some help, after all. There must be some shortcut. What is magic for, if not for shortcuts?

And the response they receive goes something like this:

"Yeah, there’s a shortcut alright. Now, first you’ll want to go about fifteen meters along the west corridor to where there’s the suit of armor holding a brass pineapple, and you’ll want to duck under his armpit before he hits you over the head, because there’s another passage there and you’ll want to follow  _that_  until you see the portrait of the archer wearing nothing but a figleaf, and you’ll have to avoid his arrows, but that’s the turn you want to take, which puts you near Ravenclaw Tower after a bit, so you might want to get really good at riddles because the statues near there can be really hard to pass otherwise, but just follow the main corridor up there until the second left, which takes you to the back way around Sprout’s office, so watch out for her Poisonous Purple Murtlaps, and once you’re clear of those you’ll want to take the slow-moving staircase up three flights, unless it’s a Tuesday, because on Tuesdays that staircase tends to evaporate, so bring a broomstick if you can’t transfigure yourself a stepladder, yeah? Anyway, after  _that_ —”

"That’s alright," the first-year will say uneasily, "I’ll just take the long way, I think."

Magic does provide shortcuts; it’s true. But these shortcuts are not for the faint of heart.


	43. Invention of the Wolfsbane

Damocles had not inherited the condition that left his mother a wreck, that slashed her skin to ribbons every full moon, that led his father to shut her away from the rest of them, to abandon her to the care of a professional who — with sedatives, chains, and powerful wards — kept her from harming people.

It was a miracle that he hadn’t inherited it. He’d been inside her the whole time, hadn’t he? Such a remarkable thing. A child somehow surviving all that, the horrible breaking and remolding of the flesh, the loss of his mother’s humanity. His father, enraged to have a bride so broken, had written to the Society of Potioneers for aid, and they’d returned his missives with powerful solutions for the child, poisons to weaken the beastly mother. And the case garnered great scientific attention. People pondered whether they ought to cut the baby out and leave the infected carrier to die, for the safety of dear little Damocles. Libatius Borage wrote ninety-seven pages in the leading journal outlining how very impossible it would be to save the mother, how she was sure to perish.

Given her condition, no one much minded the thought.

But Damocles, working hard to make his name in the field, years later, such a rare young man, somehow desirous of seeing the world through the eyes of the infected —  _Damocles_  did. Damocles minded, later on.


	44. History Repeating

Now, I stumbled into the Hogs Head, all over with fury because of James Potter, that awful little shit; and the prank he had played me and my mates; and how he would never be punished for it, not really, how he would still get whatever job he wanted, whatever girl he wanted, whatever life he wanted. And if he wanted to keep me out of a life like that? No one was going to stop him.

And I poured it out to the barkeep as he poured me out a Butterbeer, and, merciless, uncaring of my woes, this is what he said:

"Point at Mr. Potter and his housemates, athletic, sunny, and attractive; and declare that they are life’s winners, life’s chosen, the most favored of their kind. Do it. I dare you.

"Did you ever hear about Tom’s friends? The scions of their respective houses? Do you imagine them hunchbacked, ugly, ill-favored? They were not. Mr. Nott, champion of the Quidditch Pitch! Traditionalist, sporty Mr. Avery. Abraxas Malfoy, with that wife of his the queen of conservative-cut robes and hearth and home and defense against the Muggle incursion. And let us not forget the first Mr. Mulciber, with his galleons in the bank and his stunning sisters and his racing brooms.

"Now Albus, Albus collected freaks. Orphans, werewolves, rebel sons, half-giants, even the scurf of Tom’s group, sneaking and greasy and cruel and unfortunate. Pawn people, all of them. Either doomed to be sacrificed to uphold the glorious ways of Averys and Mulcibers, or else determined to dash themselves against these winners, life’s winners, in order to break the old ways.

"Albus was sharp, see. He collected up all these losers, and did with them as he liked, positioned them here and there, until he defeated the sunny winners."

"What good does that do me?" I demanded. The only Albus I had to contend with was as stuck-up as his brother, as spoiled and coddled and famous for his family’s name. I said so. The barkeep laughed.

"Ah, but the Albus I knew wasn’t like that at all. Nor his brother. But he set the world revolving, see. He pushed for change, to punish the winners for their cruel dominance, to redress the balance.

And the worse this new Albus is, and his brother, too — the more they will alienate the losers of the world. And someone — someone somewhere — will see it and will set the wheels in motion again.

"Famous names don’t matter much. Nor prowess on the pitch. Nor house, nor blood. There is only power, and those who let themselves believe it cannot be defeated. Those who are fooled by it. Those made weak by it."

This seemed to tug at some recollection, some footnote in my History of Magic textbook. I said, “Didn’t — didn’t the Dark Lord say that? Or something like it?”

The barkeep said, “Maybe. Wouldn’t surprise me. They were not much different. But no, that was an Albus saying. That was a Dumbledore maxim. Through and through.” 


	45. History Undone

The path of the world is no sure thing. Events are not certain, though fools and soothsayers say otherwise. Even that which has already occurred means nothing! Nothing to a witch or wizard with sufficient determination. On one night, for example, a boy and girl unwound time’s spool, saved more than one life and discovered, by undoing a darker timeline, a power strong enough to drive darkest evil away. 

So give us a cruel world, and we know it may be possible to wind back until we are in a better one.

Suppose Mr. Malfoy, who would unwittingly bring the war to a head and discover a certain cabinet and change the fate of an entire school — suppose his father triumphed? And sent him away to a different place, a school much harder and colder, where he became by degrees a thinner and overall less important figure — a footnote, really — simply the boy cheering on Krum in a throwaway scene?

Then no one would invade the school at all, not for thirty more years, and in all that time the war would rage on, would progress to the continent, would claim many more lives.

And what of Ms. Lovegood? Suppose her mother, that stabilizing force, had never died. Suppose she were there to counter Xenophilius’s every curious mood, suppose she were there to provide loving support and careful advice to her daughter, to furnish the secrets of friendship.

Why, then Ms. Lovegood will be close to young Brocklehursts and Bodes, if still considered a bit odd; and when some grim young hero rushes past her, looking for the secrets of a certain ghost, she will not have the answer for him. She will have been busy with friends, not lonely enough to have sought chilling and ghostly answers.

Suppose Mr. Weasley worked very late, all through until the morning, and never came home to his loving wife on a cold night, and in eleven years’ time been short one son? Or perhaps it happened a year later, and they were short a daughter?

Suppose that two dentists had moved to Australia long ago? A long-desired trip! And there their little girl was accepted to some curious outback school, where the students kept massive spiders as pets and played rougher games than Quidditch. She thrived, of course. Books and cleverness. But in the meantime Britain was lost, and two Hogwarts schoolboys who need her lost with it.

Suppose Mr. Longbottom’s parents had ceded a certain case to Auror Shacklebolt, and let him meet certain doom, while they accepted Uncle Algernon’s advice to remove to Canada? Suppose that, when the children of Hogwarts looked about for someone to remind them what courage was, courage was not there at all. He was in Vancouver, safe and warm and loved, and they were terrified, and soon to give up.

Well. Events are not sure things. Though we might suppose none of this happened, suppose something like it did. Suppose Harry Potter faced certain doom aged and friendless and alone, and suppose that instead he unwound the spool of time somehow, undid his whole universe. And in the undoing he found these strange crossroads, these moments where such crucial people, and others, just as crucial — a professor who might have married her Muggle, a godfather who might have chosen his family, and so on — set in motion different events.

And each time, with every change, he found an unwinnable future, something unspeakably dreadful, as though in order to produce a world where enough might live on and the world might continue to spin, he would have to knit the world into the right pattern, to find the right alchemical mixture of events.

Suppose, having undone the wrong at the heart of his universe, he set upon a novel idea: to fix all the others. To travel to one where a golden-haired girl was living locked up in St. Mungo’s, and her brother very merrily conquering the world, never once dispensing a lemon drop. That had to be fixed. And so too the world where a young man never lent away his Invisibility Cloak, and was able to shield himself and his wife from death, and their son grew slightly spoiled, and much less malleable, and did not succumb to the would-be conqueror’s machinations, and all was lost. 

And so too the world where Peter Pettigrew did the right thing.

Suppose that in this timeline, the one recorded, the real one (or so we think), whenever Hermione needed the right book, there was a strange attendant in Flourish and Blotts pointing her to it, for without its knowledge she might never have accomplished what she did? Suppose there was someone to come across a broken De-Luminator in the Headmaster’s possession and to fix it for him, so that it might be handed off to Ron Weasley someday? Suppose it was him. A sufficiently determined Harry Potter.

Would he have left some clue behind, some key for how to do it without causing too much havoc? If it had been Hermione, she would have. Suppose it was Hermione. In one timeline, perhaps it was; and she wrote a book, detailed and instructive, and very clear if one were clever enough to decipher it. Or suppose Ron did, presenting it all like a game of chess.

Suppose the book fell into the right hands. Suppose it fell into the wrong ones.

They would only need to change events to achieve their ends. This is easy, for a magical person with enough determination. So perhaps they did just that.


End file.
